I asked three people the same question: what held, when everything else went? They agreed to have their answers written down on the condition that I did not tidy them up.

The first: a redundancy

“I was out for fourteen months. The first three I handled well, which I now think was shock. By month six I could not open the laptop.

What held was Tuesday. There is a group that meets on Tuesday and I went every week because I had said I would, back when I was still handling it well. I contributed nothing for about four months. Nobody said anything about it.

I have thought a lot about why that worked and I think it is because it was a commitment I made when I was strong, that I then had to keep when I was not. If it had depended on how I felt on the day I would have gone twice.”

The second: a diagnosis

“You find out very quickly who can sit with something they cannot fix.

Most people can’t. They arrive with a plan, or a supplement, or a story about someone who recovered, and I understood that it was love, and it was still exhausting. I ended up managing their distress about my illness.

What held was two people who asked how the week had been and then let me answer honestly, including the weeks where the honest answer was ‘bad and getting worse.’ They never once followed it with ‘but.’

That is the whole skill. No ‘but.’”

The third: a bereavement

“The prayers stopped working around week three. I do not mean God stopped answering; I mean the mechanism broke — I opened my mouth and there was nothing on the other side of it.

What held was that other people prayed and I stood there. The Wednesday evening thing, where they read and there is silence and you do not have to say anything. I went for eight months without praying a word and I was, the whole time, inside a room where prayer was happening.

I would not have believed that counted. It counted.”

What is common

Reading these back, the same three things sit under all of them.

• The thing that held was decided in advance. In every case it was a commitment made while well that carried them through being unwell.
• It was a room, not an idea. Not a doctrine, not a verse. A room, on a fixed night, with the same people in it.
• Nobody in the room tried to fix them. In all three accounts the help that helped was the help that did not require them to get better in order to keep receiving it.

The most useful thing you can do for your own hard year is to be in something now, while you do not need it, that will still have you when you do.

What we are doing about it

The small groups and the Wednesday reflections exist for exactly this. Both are open, both take about a term before they start to feel like yours, and both will hold you long before you know their names.

Which is an argument for starting this month rather than the month you need it.